Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday April 21, 2010 @02:23PM
from the keeping-up-with-the-jobses dept.

bobwrit points out a story at PC Magazine, from which he extracts "Google has purchased Agnilux, a secretive chip house made up of engineers who architected the heart of the iPad, then left the company. Reuters' PEHub reported the story Tuesday night. A Google spokesman also confirmed the acquisition to PCMag.com. 'We're pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don't have any additional information to share right now,' a Google spokesman said Tuesday night via email."

Because they already started their own company, called PA Semi, and Apple bought it specifically to get their hands on the development team? I'd have expected Apple to insist that the employees had signed contracts that would prevent this kind of thing. I'd also expect Google to be a bit wary of buying a company founded by the same people who just quit the company that had just bought the last company they'd founded...

I'd have expected Apple to insist that the employees had signed contracts that would prevent this kind of thing.

There's no way Apple could do that. PA Semi employees didn't have any such contract (I presume), and when Apple bought them, there's no way they could have forced the employees to sign such a contract. I've never heard of a company being purchased on the condition that the employees sign away their rights before the purchase.

Apple probably doesn't care if they go on their own way and have a great success, say, making chips for controlling A/C units. But going to Google, whom they see as a big ship in collision course with them, can't end up in a happy "we're all friends" ending, can it?

Up until now I've been saying this Google-Apple war is very one sided with Apple doing a lot if ineffectual attacking with Google (removing the word "google" from the Iphone, various comments including the two "porn store" comments). But this changes that.

Google I would say have just pulled off their own Doolittle raid, whilst completely ineffectual from a business standpoint it does send an important message to Apple, don't forget we can strike anywhere, even in the very heart of your business.

Typically, a group like that builds a chip or architecture and learns from the experience. Sitting around having a few beers or in the cafeteria they start talking about how they could make the bestest, badest, most energy efficient or highest performance or whatever chip ever, given what they know now. Someone knows someone who works higher up at google and pretty soon they are talking.

Seems smart. Why am I paying for (and paying to power) this Intel floating point unit when I'm only serving web pages?

But, Google's growth has been perpetuated by use of cheap commodity hardware, ie: profiting off the fact that the rest of us drive the price down by buying lots. A switch to specialized chips would mean a new direction for the company.

I mean, they could have done this from the beginning with fancy IBM or SUN or Unisys mainframe stuff, which typically allow you to configure IO subsystems (which is the main bottleneck of web serving). Likewise if they are doing database stuff you'd want a lot of RAM and wide I/O bandwidth, 128 bits or more. All standard for a long time on IBM stuff. But it's expensive, not commodity. Even Google's 100-300K servers (or maybe it's a million now, who knows) is not going to bring the scale of the whole worldwide market for Intel chips (100M plus annually).

So I don't see how this could benefit them long-term. Sure, power savings might add up to a lot so it's a good investment. And since they want to be the entire Internet (including your desktop), it's really a matter of energy over all else. But they are definitely going to need to keep adding hardware to keep growing, so that means higher chip expenses upfront. But, if they can spin the same processor into a little home or mobile computer to connect to their services, they might be able to start leveraging this scale thing again. But it seems to be a big risk to get into the manufacturing business.

Google's famous for being a risk taker. They try a ton of stuff and keep what seems to work. It keeps them fluid. The search engine game was good for them for a long time but they seem to get the hint that the way of the world is "innovate or die", so they're branching out. Gmail/Google Apps and the Android seem to be working out for them pretty well.

I think that this branching out is just a sign of a company doing the right thing and keeping active rather than resting on it's laurels.

They are?? Seems like a "risk taker" wouldn't have required months of research and usability studies to decide on a simple color change or that they should in fact increase the font size of their home page by 2 points...

Don't get me wrong, I think their "20%" concept, their "labs/beta" products, etc, are great ideas. I just don't think they are "risky".

I would define risky as taking a big enough chance on something that if it goes badly it could result in significant downside. Palm betting their future on a new phone OS... that's risky (oops!) Google allocating a higher-than-industry-average R&D budget? That's somewhat innovative, and probably good business practice, but not particularly risky.

That's fine. While I love my iPhone and I'll gladly shill Apple's crap for free, there's hardly a master of any of these(I'll argue that yes, Apple deservedly top of the heap for mobile devices; but if there were no iPhone, Android *would* be the sexiest thing on the block; even if there are huge, radical flaws with the platform). When it comes to maps, fiber, search, even Usenet, Google does things well.

Not really android is pretty much just what a tablet and touch screen interface is for. as for fiber they've been doing that for a while i'v read. I hope the are a JOAT soon:) i'd take their internet gladly.

The reality is that Google is not a monolithic entity that does everything poorly. I don't think the search team has much to do with the Android team. They probably don't have many "jacks of all trades", but instead have many small, focused teams that are really good at what they do.

Just because they share the same brand name doesn't mean they all work out of one homogenous brain-pool.

I mean, there are plenty of companies making ARM chips for phones. Google will want to use commodity stuff for that -- it means that the cost of innovating around the phone platform (hardware side) is someone else's problem, and that's already happening.

On the other hand, they have enormous power bills and would gain personally from computers which do the same amount of work as what they currently have for 1/10th the power.

Google's avoided making their own servers (using a commodity board) because other pe

If ARM scaled up well, wouldn't we have seen ARM Linux servers by now?

I suspect the answer is that none of the off-the-shelf ARM SoCs come with the kind of network and disk controllers that servers need. This means that you can't just use off-the-shelf ARM parts in a server, you need to do a fair bit of custom work. A quad-core Cortex A9 with a couple of SATA and GigE controllers on die would be a pretty nice server chip for a lot of workloads.

Because you need custom silicon. The people who make ARM SoCs are not in the server market. They'd need to design a new SoC for that market, and they'd then need to persuade system builders to use it. It's a lot more effort than just buying an off-the-shelf x86 chip and using that and it's a lot higher risk because you are assuming that there is a market for ARM-based servers. It makes sense for a company like Google, because they know there is a market for whatever hardware they produce; themselves. T

I don't actually believe that Apple lost a lot of momentum in this defection. In general, it's the folks who had alternative ideas for an architecture that didn't win out that tend to leave. I bet Google eventually gets stuck with something like a chip that has an insane pipeline structure, makes a different power/speed tradeoff (and probably for the worse), or has some other weird bag o'crap bolted to the side.

In addition, there are a *lot* of chip designers still left over from the chip manufacturer lay

As someone else said, ARM may not be the best platform for Google's servers.

If what you say is true - they're the divergent group of engineers - then it's quite possible that Google hired them for that very reason. Maybe they wanted to build a PPC architecture for Apple's iPad, or something else entirely. We do know that these engineers were focused on power efficiency, and that is a very big concern for Google (it's a large part of their operations costs, after all). There are a lot of ways to save power w

Some of the key talent, yes. However, that talent would have been wasted at Apple, just as their fine processor was. I'd be surprised if any of top people stayed long, after Apple tossed out their years of effort, only to have them doing ASIC monkey work.

It disgusts me to see how Apple chews up brilliant companies only to scavenge a few bits and pieces.

Apple has a good handle on their vertical, from hardware to content. Google is just beginning its jump into the hardware portion. I imagine this is just another rung in the ladder from the bottom to the top, control all the way.

Um, Google didn't design that. HTC did. It's not very different at all from HTC's Windows Mobile products.

Even the Nexus One isn't a Google design - it's an HTC phone carrying Google branding. (Which is very common, HTC has ALWAYS been very rebranding-friendly, it is only very recently that you started seeing the HTC brand in the United States even though HTC phones have been in the USA for quite a while.)

Um, Google didn't design that. HTC did. It's not very different at all from HTC's Windows Mobile products.

Google laid out the platform, which is what people care about. Hell when the thing first came out it was just called the "Google Phone" by most people. Google providing the firmware while other companies deal with the hardware seems to be how they're approaching this market, and they seem to be doing well with it.

Custom designed server boards aren't as hard as you think - based on what CPU and Chip set combo you plan on using there is a starting working reference design for you to customize (only exception was when VIA reverse engineered their own P4 chip set using no reference)

but the point being - it is a lot easier to do something custom if you do it by modifying something that you already know works..

For internal consumption only, though. This may be a move into producing hardware for consumers who are less, shall we say, tolerant of addenda to manuals like "Oh yeah, that rail is +5.5V and not +5V. Sorry."

Apple has a good handle on their vertical, from hardware to content. Google is just beginning its jump into the hardware portion. I imagine this is just another rung in the ladder from the bottom to the top, control all the way.

You seem a bit confused.

Apple designed the vertical integration from the word go, Google designed an open platform from the word go. What you state is the antithesis of an open platform

If Google is entering the consumer hardware business which is pure speculation at this poin

"The firm's enormous security guard reacted quickly to the arrival of Carlos the Jackal. Reaching for the closest blunt instrument at hand, the guard picked up I. M. Pei and architected the terrorist to death."

"The firm's enormous security guard reacted quickly to the arrival of Carlos the Jackal. Reaching for the closest blunt instrument at hand, the guard picked up I. M. Pei and architected the terrorist to death."

And then, about 5 years later, the WinPad.Right with a “early experimental hacked together” OpenPad, which is only actually usable 5 years later,and looks and behaves exactly like the WinPad with some missing smoothness, which itself behaves exactly like the GPad and iPad only a lot more annoying and with shitloads of security holes.;)

Google has been spending a lot of effort -- from custom power structures inside their buildings to buying that magic box that generates power form minerals to custom-making their own server blades -- to reduce power and make energy efficient servers; they have so many of them after all.

These guys, while formerly PA Semi, focused their new business on energy-efficient server CPU's. So I wouldn't so much expect a gPad. It's likely the consumer will never see the chips that are being produced here.

It's also unlikely that Google would ever see a ROI from purchasing an entire semi-conductor company just to save a bit of money on the chips in their own servers. They're planning on marketing these to SOMEONE. They might be part of servers, or they might be part of a pad (I think Android-based pads are an inevitability myself - it's just a question of if these will power them or not). Heck they might be part of a set-top box or something else, but they are definitely planning on selling these chips as

We're talking millions per year worth of money for powering their server farms. The custom blade design alone saved them a few million annually. We're not talking small money, especially as they keep expanding to meet the needs of the tubes.

I know we're talking millions per year powering their server farms, but keep things in perspective. NOTHING will eliminate that power bill. All something can do is REDUCE it. So you have to look at the difference in power consumption as the return. Total power consumption is moot. Now consider: how much did they pay for this company? We don't know, but semi-conductor firms tend to run in the HUNDREDS of million of dollars. You also have to take away from that the cost associated with RUNNING this com

It should be fairly obvious that your estimate of the acquisition price is substantially wrong. Yes, semiconductor manufacturing firms are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Intel and Motorola are worth billions.

But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a startup that doesn't even have a webpage. They have a handful of employees and very likely they have little or no revenue at all. Google was buying a convenient blob of talent, nothing more. I'd be astounded if they paid m

In ASIC world, to "design" means to write RTL code (and all that follows it) that matches the desired architecture. To "architect", means to write the high-level spec of what the design should look like.

It's not bullshit, it's the proper terminology for the topic at hand. You could argue that the terminology is lame or whatever, but it is what it is.

Why would Google acquire anyone with a website ( http://agnilux.com/ [agnilux.com] ) that currently states "This Web site is coming soon." Are we supposed to be capitalizing the word Web in website, and why can't it be one word? This acquisition is causing us to reassess fundamental assumptions about spelling and capitalization of common terms! Aha- now I realize why they acquired them.

A 32-bit architecture like ARM really has no place in Google's servers, and it is hard to imagine that those who jumped ship from PASemi/Apple would want to do the same sort of ARM integration monkey work at Google.

It is a shame that Google didn't pick up PASemi before Apple wasted their processor and years of effort; the PA6T would have served Google very well. I expect that Google is thinking long-term here, and we may even see a brand new 64-bit ISA, something that scales well from phones to low-power s

That may seem fine now, but core and memory density will continue to grow. It just doesn't scale, and in a few years, the efficiency advantages will be lost with increasingly integration. For example, a single 32-core/32GB machine vs. eight 4-core/4GB machines, 8 network connections, etc. Also, 32-bits of address space is already insufficient to properly utilize 4GB of physical RAM.

The fact is, it is a dead end, and I don't think Google is short-sighted or arrogant enough to employ some of the most talen

If Microsoft wasn't broken up and its leaders put in prison for its obscene anti-trust violations and "questionable practices", I don't see how the government could possibly prosecute Google with a straight face.